What this really comes down to is the slightly embarrassing fact that scientists don’t even agree on what “life” means in the first place. So how would we know if we’ve made it, if it doesn’t resemble life as we know it?
We are faced with a choice. We can recognise that quantum mechanics – with all its weirdness – is a purely symbolic framework for predicting the probabilistic outcomes of our experiments. It is indeed a calculational trick, not to be taken literally, which allows us some ability to get a handle on an otherwise unfathomable atomic and subatomic world.
Or we can recognise (with Einstein and Schrödinger) that quantum theory is at the very least incomplete, and deeply unsatisfactory. A theory capable of fathoming the atomic and subatomic world ought to be possible, if only we have the will to look for it, and the wit to find it.
As Koreans who have lived through the fortnightly car-park-supermarket-lorry rationing days, it’s both fascinating and confusing to see the meteoric rise of our cuisine across just two decades. Even as we are relieved that we can now easily access Korean food around London, we’ve also been curious to figure out what lies behind this rapid escalation in popularity. Though finding Korean food may now be straightforward, the journey to get here has been far less so.
I can’t help but wonder what Castelveto and Evelyn, two of the patriarchs of salad orthodoxy, would make of today’s sweet salad renaissance — those jiggly, kaleidoscopic creations that, against all odds, can be as unexpectedly sophisticated as they are nostalgic. Even when chopped Snickers bars and whipped topping make an appearance. One imagines their horror deepening upon encountering “Sweet Farm!” the new cookbook from Food Network star and author Molly Yeh released in March.
The insight—that the pause between waves of pain offers an opportunity for respite, however fleeting—is one that reverberates after Nelson’s final pages. We trust the wry self-awareness of someone “trying to act nonchalant, and not like someone who keeps a 10,000-word pain history on her desktop,” because our collective pain history runs to infinite pages. Concluding a book grounded in the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nelson avows, “the moment for the lesson is now,” and her “now” lands with startling prescience in our “now” of excruciating uncertainty and ongoing dismay. These hard-won lessons of resilience and stamina offer, if not consolation, then indispensable counsel.
Macfarlane’s book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map. In the UK, “a gradual, desperate calamity” has befallen them, with annual sewage dumps (recorded by a tracker called Top of the Poops) at despicable levels. “Generational amnesia” means that young people don’t know what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wants them to revive – and to remind us of the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, as captured in a Māori proverb: “I am the river; the river is me.”